Ian Forsyth, program manager at ARM, announced this week that Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) was onboard and the two companies were working together closely to make sure one or more versions of Windows support the new iteration of the low-power architecture.

Nandan Nayampally, head of ARM's processor marketing division, wrote toPC World in an email, "ARM works with all its OS and ecosystem partners to inform them on next generation technologies and enable their support."

The current version of Windows 8 for ARM chips -- Windows RT -- only supports 32-bit chips. Likewise, Windows Server 2012 is expected to bring ARM server chip support -- but no 64-bit support. That's not much of a problem because, as mentioned, 64-bit ARM CPUs won't land for another two years.

x86 software does not run natively on ARM architecture chips, or vice versa. That means that any application you want to run will need to have been freshly recompiled for Windows on ARM (WOA).

The grunt work is not limited to recompilation. Microsoft will have a lot of hard work ahead looking to port and optimize Windows 8 or its successor to work with the new ARMv8 64-bit instruction set extensions.

It does not matter if it will flop in desktop! if MS sells enough it to mobile versions, the win9 and win10 will definitely have Metro UI. They sell so much more OS lisenses by that way.MS don't have to sell single desktop computer with win8 and it still can be them more profitable than win7 ever was or will be. The economy is funny thing!Enterprize will move to Metro in 2018 or 2019 a year or two before the support ends to win7. Just like they did with winXP! Actually it can happen much quiker this time, because the programs that run in win7, will allso run same way in win8, win9, win10... After that it will be harder to say, so they are not in situation where they have to change all their important programs when changing their OS!Win9 or win10 are very like candidates for corporates to move on, because by then there will be a lot of workers that are used to Metro UI by using their mobile devices. At this moment, I don't think that there is any reason for corporates to move on to win8. It is too early to them, but in 2-3 years the situation is different. But corporations and Enterprise market are not in harry, they never are.

Windows 8 is no reason not to buy a new PC there are plenty of 3rd party apps that disable metro and add a start bar. Windows is always successful because of new PC sales. I don't get the paranoia around win8, I've played with it for a few days now.

quote: there are plenty of 3rd party apps that disable metro and add a start bar.

...what, so now it's our job to QA Windows and fix it's massive defects that the publisher sends it out with? This isn't Apple we're talking about. No reality distortion field to make us think that's an OK way to do business.